He met cinematographer Matthew Libatique at CSUF and apprenticed under him as a camera loader and lighting technician. While working on thesis films at Loyola Marymount University, he met filmmaker brothers Tony Bui and Timothy Bui and worked as a lighting technician on their feature films Three Seasons (1999), directed by Tony Bui and Green Dragon (2001), directed by Timothy Bui. Gauger also worked as a key grip on the feature film Six-String Samurai (1998), directed by Lance Mungia, as a gaffer in the Vietnamese action film The Rebel (2007), directed by Charlie Nguyen and as a gaffer in Ham Tran's Journey from the Fall (2006). Gauger also served as a cinematographer on short films such as Moonlight (2006), directed by Alice Chen; Good Bad Karma (2006), directed by David Takemura; Jim and Kim (2010), directed by Victor Teran; and Finding Gauguin (2010), directed by Lee Donald Taicher. Gauger also served as his own cinematographer on films he directed, including Vietnam Overtures, Owl and the Sparrow (2007) and Saigon Electric (2011).
Gauger's music documentary (and first documentary) Vietnam Overtures (2008) is about a music exchange program between Norway and the music institutions of Vietnam and premiered at the 2008 Hawaii International Film Festival.[2]
Gauger directed and produced a TV pilot written by Feodor Chin and Will Henning entitled Chinatown Squad, which focuses on a four-man squad of San Francisco police officers in the 1980s that attempt to clean up Chinatown from corruption.[7] The pilot stars Feodor Chin (as Chinese mob boss villain, Pistol Pete) as well as Kelvin Han Yee (as Uncle Wong), David Huynh (as Fong) and Robert Wu (as the translator specialist of the squad).[8][9]
Gauger also directed a short film titled The Moral Paper Route (2012), that starred actors from Chinatown Squad, including Feodor Chin as the father, Rita Huang as the mother and David Huynh as the son.
Cheetah: The Nelson Vails Story
Gauger directed a documentary in 2014 entitled Cheetah: The Nelson Vails Story on former Olympic road and track cyclist Nelson Vails.
Kiss and Spell (Yêu Đi, Đừng Sợ!)
Gauger's penultimate film, Yêu Đi, Đừng Sợ! (Translated as "Kiss and Spell") (2017) is a Vietnamese romantic comedy about a magician who is afraid of ghosts who falls in love with a girl that appears to have some connection to the supernatural. It was released on August 25, 2017, in Vietnam and distributed by CJ Entertainment Vietnam. It was also a Vietnamese language remake of a similar Korean film known as Spellbound and won the Audience Award at the 2017 National Film Festival (or Da Nang Film Festival) in Da Nang.
My Brother Vincent
Gauger's final film (released posthumously) was the documentary My Brother Vincent (2018), which was about the play initially written and performed by Leonard Nimoy in the 1970s on the life of painter Vincent van Gogh. French actor Jean-Michel Richaud brought the play back in 2018 and the documentary features interviews with Nimoy, Richaud and various Van Gogh historians, as well as segments covering Van Gogh's career and important regions during his life such as south of France (where he painted most of his work), Belgium (where he was a preacher to coal miners) and the Netherlands (his birthplace).
Gauger wrote the screenplay for a short film entitled Finding Gauguin (2010), directed by Lee Donald Taicher. Gauger also wrote screenplays for the films he has directed, including Owl and the Sparrow and Saigon Electric.